Kyocera Mita FS-1320D review

Summary

Our Score

8/10

Review Price free/subscription

Kyocera Mita is well known for its mono laser printers, which have a good reputation for speed and low TCO. The FS-1320D sits in the middle of its personal printer range, but still offers duplex print and a good level of expandability.

Coloured in cream and dark grey the angular case is relieved by slopes and rises on its top surface and by a circle of six LEDs to the right of the paper output slot. These indicate low toner, low paper, paper jams, ready and data status, and cycle around when the machine is initialising. There are just two control buttons, coloured green and orange, to stop and restart a print job.

At the bottom of the front panel is a 250-sheet paper tray and just above this is a neat, well engineered, 50-sheet multi-purpose tray that folds out to handle special media. You can add two optional paper trays, which Kyocera Mita again rates at 250 sheets.

At the back is a single USB socket, as this printer doesn’t offer network capabilities as standard. It's possible to add a network adapter as an option and this can be standard 10/100 Ethernet, gigabit Ethernet or wireless. You can also add extra memory to the printer, so overall it’s more than usually expandable for a machine in this price bracket.

As is usual with the Kyocera Mita printers, the photoconductor drum is a lifetime component, so all you need to maintain is toner. The single-capacity toner cartridge is rated at a high 7,200 pages and clips into a holder below the front panel in a few seconds.

The load cycle for toner takes around 15 minutes but, after that, there's nothing to attend to until the next toner recharge. As with most printers, Kyocera Mita provides a starter cartridge in the box, but even this is good for 2,300 pages.

Drivers are provided for Windows and OS X and are also available for various incarnations of both Linux and UNIX. Kyocera Mita sells mainly into businesses, so maintains wide compatibility with different platforms. The FS-1320D includes emulations of both PCL6 and PostScript L3 as standard.